The boy we see in "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz," now at the Siskel Film Center and available on demand starting this weekend, grew up in Highland Park, his imagination seizing on (and seized by) computers not long after he could walk.

The young man we see later helped create a now-common digital tool, the RSS feed. He co-founded the Reddit website. His far-flung activism endeavors included the successful push-back against the proposed online piracy act, considered a ridiculous and censorious overreach by millions.

And then, at 26, Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment. At the time he was beset by heavy legal troubles. In 2011 the computer prodigy and open-access firebrand had been arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology police working with federal officials. Swartz, deemed a hacker or a "hackivist" by many, downloaded reams of files from the nonprofit academic journal Jstor. His methods violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which many interviewed in "The Internet's Own Boy" characterize as hopelessly outmoded, a relic of a long-gone, late 20th Century computer epoch.

Swartz believed in the civic right to gain access to information. He also realized the Internet's great capacity for exploitation and surveillance in the name of national security. Here and there in writer-director Brian Knappenberger's portrait of Swartz, we feel we're getting to know an exceptionally bright and complicated figure driven by his beliefs, and launched into adulthood a little too soon.

Too much of the time, however, the intense contradictions in Swartz's too-brief life are smoothed over by a tendency toward hagiography. Accompanied, relentlessly, by an overeager and intrusive John Dragonetti musical score, "The Internet's Own Boy" offers interview after interview with sympathetic and admiring colleagues, mentors, lovers. Various parties declined to participate in the documentary, and some of them likely would've provided a bit of necessary tension, skepticism, devil's advocacy, something other than a reassertion of Swartz's achievements. The narration goes in for quick generalities such as: "Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz…"

What happened to Swartz is enraging, unless you believe his crimes warranted a potential 35 years in prison. The archival footage in "The Internet's Own Boy" offers touching glimpses of the teenage Swartz, barely tall enough to be seen behind a podium, speaking to various audiences about what lies ahead. See the movie, flaws and all, simply to see where you stand in this digital river that runs through all our lives, connecting and isolating us in ways we're barely able to comprehend.